Chapter
2:
In the Beginning, Punk Rock Cometh
In the summer between sixth
and seventh grade, two allied, Armageddon-strength
super powers converged upon my hairless
body and formative brain like Michael Jackson
at an unattended preschool. It was my twelfth
birthday party. The perpetrators: Puberty
and Punk Rock (Nuclear warheads have been
manufactured through less volatile combinations).
Punk Rock arrived wrapped in newspaper,
vinyl on the inside, with a shiny black
ribbon and a card which read: For Dan, Rock
On! The album – Dead Kennedy’s,
Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables –
was compliments of Tommy Van Winkle, my
closest childhood friend. Tommy was a slightly
taller, progressive version of myself, with
hippie parents, spiked hair (back when spiked
hair was obnoxiously nonconformist), and
an older, fishnet-clad sister who haunts
my dreams to this day. It was Tommy who
exposed me to the Violent Femmes debut album
a year earlier, an album that after one
listen had me burning my Bon Jovi posters
in the backyard. The Dead Kennedy’s
were even more overwhelming, indoctrinating,
and caustic. Their music raged about politics
and death and poverty and things my cartoon-based
psychosis could not fully comprehend. Jello
Biafra’s quivering, spectral voice
yelled of autonomy and definitive self-righteousness
with gruesome sarcasm and unfettered candor.
As I listened, and thrashed about my tiny,
L-shaped bedroom, I pictured a gigantic,
wraith-like frontman with canine teeth,
reptile skin, and a white hot trident used
to harpoon men of compromised value. After
a summer month locked in my room with earmuff-style
headphones and DK spinning 24/7, I emerged
reborn. Others soon joined in the fray:
Black Flag, 7 Seconds, Minor Threat, the
Circle Jerks, Gang Green. Punk Rock had
infiltrated my birthday party, spit out
the candles, smashed the ice cream cake
with a tattering barrage of Duct-tape-handled
baseball bats, spray painted our German
Sheppard green, forced me to shotgun a six-pack
of testosterone, and delivered a steel-toed
boot to my pimple-faced arse. There was
no turning back.
Puberty arrived at about the
same time, on its own, uninvited, gnashing
its hormonal jowls at my sickening innocence,
implementing a sporadic deployment of involuntary
erections, wiping the social ick off my
now blossoming female classmates, instilling
lewd curiosity, parental hatred, and general
malaise. Although more natural, inevitable,
and permissive than Punk music, Puberty
shares one indelible characteristic with
its chord-heavy brethren: they both impose
an imminent sense of anarchy and change.
So it was, by birthday number
thirteen I had taken to spending most of
my days gliding atop a graffiti-tagged skateboard.
My head was partially shaved, ears were
pierced (to the befuddlement of my poodle-skirt-generation
parents), clothing was easy: the more ripped
the better, the dirtier the better, the
blacker the better, and I had apprehended
an old B.C. Rich guitar from our neighbor’s
basement, intending to learn a few chords
and recreate (with Tommy on bass and another
kindred, suburban rocker, Jamie, on drums)
the energy of my newfound dissident gospel.
It’s not about musicianship (don’t
get me wrong, there are plenty of Punk bands
that can play, I’d put Dag Nasty’s
Brian Baker or East Bay Ray from the Dead
Kennedys up against the most dexterous,
fret-tapping metalhead), and perhaps the
vocals are only slightly more melodic than,
say, rabid screaming, but it’s the
music’s simplicity that makes it so
communal, so accessible, so rancorously
uninhibited, and it’s the screaming,
the ear-splitting vocals, that echo the
charge of every revolt in recorded history:
Didn’t countless Caesars scream for
reform in their Greek Republic? How many
times did Geronimo yelp a face-painted scream
while advancing on a hoard of musket-handed
oppressors, tomahawk in hand? And couldn’t
General George Washington himself, throughout
dozens of bloody battles, be found screaming
“Fire!” to a regiment of new
world hopefuls? We, the members of this
subversive music colony known as “Punk”
seek that same emotional uprising, however
misguided and hypocritical our actions may
be at times. We are the soldiers of radical
social change who, often, do not possess
the means to entice through organized dialectic
or PTA meetings, and are subsequently banished
from typical social constructs as a result,
swept into a life that echoes our innermost
confusion and rage, like the London punk
rockers with their cherry Mohawks and combat
boots, slashing each other with shattered
pint glasses, screwing in public parks,
doping on speed, stealing pocketbooks from
the Piccadilly tourists, like the New York,
Hard Core, oi-barking punks with their shaved
heads, pea-soup bomber jackets, and knapsacks
full of weaponry, slam dancing every Friday
night at the local venue, militantly vegan,
violently straight-edge, or even the homeless
ragamuffin punks of San Francisco and Long
Beach, mainlining under the pier, trading
fellatio for Big Macs, selling “Freak”
photos to the visiting norms, and playing
all-ages gigs at desecrated mansions in
the Valley. We suburbanites felt that same
pull, same hopeless anguish, or at least
the potential for it. We were not demographically
damned. No. But the iniquitous wrath of
the human animal breaths everywhere. And
your body eventually grows to realize it.
And your brain begins to understand it.
And your soul stands to fight it. And music,
Punk Rock music, for me, guides you through
it, without sugarcoated adult rhetoric,
with nothing more than a healthy expulsion
of youthful frenzy.
So, our three man militia
(Tommy, Chris, and I) assembled in Tommy’s
basement twice a week, listened to music,
abused our instruments, wrote pathetically
juvenile lyrics, and pondered the oddity
of our pubescent existence. My existence,
my childhood, my confusion, my rage: a perspective
worth writing about, a vibe worth singing
about, a life worth screaming about.
Contact Daniel McDermott:
danmcdermott@hotmail.com
Rock N Roll Addiction, Chapter
One
back
to jerseybeat.com l back
to top
ROCK N ROLL ADDICTION by Daniel McDermott
